Small Business Innovations

Menu

Getting Leads From Social Media Even When You’re Not On It

Most companies are using social media to bring in leads. Posting on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest….creating videos for Youtube, Daily Motion and Vimeo, blogging, posting on Reddit, creating live streams of content, podcasting … the list goes on and on.

As a small business owner it can become overwhelming to keep up as new social media properties continue to come online daily.

One solution is to hire a social media manager to create content for you, post for you, respond for you.

In addition to being expensive, by going this route it is easy to lose touch with your customers. You are one step removed from interacting with them directly. This means that you begin to lose sight of what they want and how your products or services are impacting them.

In my own business I noticed a big shift when I started tapping into those people who were looking for me and what my business had to offer. This does not mean that I stopped putting my brand out there altogether, it means that I started searching for and locating what people were already asking for.

Instead of two ships passing in the night — I was putting out what I had to offer; a potential client was requesting my services — but the two were never connecting. I began to search out what was being requested and in rushed the leads.

How often do you see on Facebook or in a forum, “Does anyone know a good plumber?” or “I’m going to be moving to Dallas next month, can someone recommend a realtor?”

If you are a plumber in that city or a realtor in Dallas, how awesome would it be for you to get notified as soon as someone posted a comment like that? Then you could go in and respond to them!

There is a software that I own that will allow you to do just that. I have been using it for the past month to bring in leads for my own consulting business.

In addition to bringing in leads, I also use it to monitor what people are saying about my business. This gives me the opportunity to see both the positive and negative, so that I can respond and engage in conversation with my clients and potential clients. It is so powerful to be able to respond to someone’s concerns or praise in real time! It is often enough to turn a disgruntled client into a raving fan.

With this software, you just enter in the keywords you want monitored. So that can be your name and business name if you want to keep on top of your online reputation. It can be phrases such as “looking for realtor in [your city],” or “best realtor in [your city],” etc. The sky’s the limit; you can create as many searches as you’d like.

Within minutes, the software begins to return all instances of those phrases found anywhere online. On forums and blogs and on social media accounts and then it will continue to search 24/7 bringing in all instances as they get posted.

You never have to be blindsided by a negative review again. And you literally have leads being dropped into your email box. It’s awesome.

To learn more about this great piece of software that can help you keep an eye on your online reputation AND bring leads into your business AND lets you spy on what your competition is doing, check it out here.

It’s always more fun to have leads coming to you, than you chasing leads. 🙂

Let me know what you think! What do you do to bring leads into your business?